In 2020, Mayor Lori Lightfoot established
Chicago Food Equity Agenda, a multi-year partnership between communities and city representatives to remove barriers to urban farming, support BIPOC entrepreneurs and social groups, and connect people with healthy, nutritious food through education and program expansion.
"One of the initiatives was to update the city's licensing, to give urban growers a way to expand their businesses by being able to sell fresh, whole, uncut produce, unprocessed produce, at a produce stand on a community garden," says Sebastian-Arias.
The Greater Chicago Food Depository has worked with local food pantries to expand food distribution on the West side, helping to eliminate barriers and maximize nutrition programs, connecting residents to distribution areas and increasing awareness of SNAP restaurant meal options.
"A lot of innovation happened during our pandemic," Laboy says. "We actually cut food insecurity for children in half."
During the beginning of the Covid-19 Pandemic, Instacart provided assistance to West Garfield Park residents by working with the USDA to ensure residents could use their SNAP dollars digitally.
"It's so important for people to be able to have that choice too," says Sarah Mastrorocco, VP and GM of Instacart Health. "We now accept EBT, SNAP in over 30,000 locations in all 50 states."
Wellness West has also partnered with Chicago Botanic Garden to deliver a comprehensive farm-to-table approach.
"We have five [farms], mostly on the Southwest side of the city that then gets sold, donated at accessible prices at our farm in Ogden location and to our produce prescription program," says Carmen Vergara, vice president of community partnerships for Chicago Botanic Garden.
"Making sure that we're having affordable produce at accessible prices for people on the West Side is really our mission and our goal."
Wellness West also partners with hospital systems to provide education on healthy food practices with a primary care physician with the goal of reducing chronic disease risk and increasing life expectancy.
Julia Bassett, senior manager of Rush University System for Health, says they conduct community health needs assessments to determine if a patient is experiencing food insecurity.
Providers ask patients questions about social determinants of health and automatically enroll them in the "Food is Medicine" program at Rush if they answer yes to any of the food insecurity questions. A community health worker works with them to ensure they receive resources after their appointment.
"We give them healthy recipes; how to rinse those shelf stable foods off and how to make them more healthy," Bassett says. "We have about 73% of our patients that are African American women, 26% of those folks are Hispanic, so we have to make sure that we're culturally appropriate when we're deciding on the type of produce that we're picking out for our patients."
Loretto Hospital and the Greater Chicago Food Depository are also partnering together to create the first hospital-based free grocery store in the country. Located within the hospital, the store will be available to the community.
Tesa Anewishki, the first African and Native-American CEO of Loretto Hospital and board secretary for Wellness West, says the hospital-based grocery store will help educate their patients and the community on the importance of eating healthy to live longer.
"We're focused on the outside; first we got to help those that are on our team as well as help the community," Anewishki says.
A secure and sustainable food system requires a combination of retail outlets, urban gardens, safety net programs, and financial support structures working together to achieve better health outcomes with healthy, affordable food.
"Food is a basic human right," says Laboy. "What we really need to be working toward is equitable access and culturally affirming nutritious food, where anyone can walk into a grocery store and buy the products that they want."
